With the accumulated body of scientifically vetted evidence pointing squarely at the reality of incendiary and explosive devices in the WTC complex, apologists for the official theory have forcefully resorted to the absence of (acceptable) whistle-blowers as a reason to dismiss the calls for a new investigation. And it must at least give one pause. Why haven't more people come forward with explicit details?

We may find insight into that question by taking a closer look at the intricate web of deals that allowed the most massive defrauding of the public in recorded history. The specifics are complicated, but a synopsis is useful:

Mortgage companies like Countrywide and Freddie & Fannie, with financing from a handful of household names of the banking world, sold adjustable rate (subprime) mortgages to millions of Americans who previously didn't even come close to qualifying for a home loan.

These banks then repackaged these loans and sold them to investment banks like Lehman Bros. and Bear Stearns. These investment banks then re-repackaged these loans, insured them (mostly through AIG and a few others), and thus allowed them to attain a AAA investment rating--safe as houses--and re-resold them to financial institutions around the globe. These were the so-called Collateralized Debt Obligations (CDO's).

Everyone got what they wanted at this point as money was made at every transaction. The investment banks knew these loans weren't worth the paper they were written on--because the loan originators designed them to become unaffordable. Knowing that the loans would fail they took out contracts (bets) that the mortgages, and hence the CDO's would lose value. These contracts were known as derivatives--(credit default swaps) and are still legal to this day!

Estimations of the amount of wealth being insured and the amounts at stake in the derivatives markets are difficult to make and range from $60 Trillion to $600 Trillion depending on the source. At any rate, it was well understood that the bet makers--who made their money on the front end of derivatives contracts--could never have made good on these bets simply because it amounted to more money than has ever existed on the planet. Hence, the multiple bailouts of AIG, among others.

It would be facile to call this a Ponzi scheme. No, it had many more moving parts than a simple, top-down fleecing of unwitting investors. In many cases, the institutions involved were making more money than they had ever made since their inception. From the loan originators to the mortgage lenders to the investment banks and hedge funds, all parties shared, to a degree, in the knowledge and hence, complicity of this massive scheme.

Ultimately, no one cared that millions of people would be foreclosed upon, given the amounts of money being made at the higher echelons. Loan originators had every motivation to keep producing blatantly bad loans, just as the investment banks had every motivation to sell them as CDO's with the knowledge that they were worth nothing. This quick synopses doesn't even get into the particulars of this sausage factory, however, the structure of this massive scheme is instructive to our understanding of how someone caught in the midst of a morally questionable situation may simply sidestep personal morality by appealing to the institution to which they make a living.

Sam Antar, a convicted white-collar criminal in a documentary about the recent financial scandals, says that all financial schemes have at least 4 distinct layers:

1. The guy giving the orders

2. The people following the orders

3. The people who knew it was going on but didn't participate, and,

4. The people who should've known trouble was amiss, but didn't try to look.

From what can be pieced together, the structure of the operation (or operations) designed to amplify the destruction by crashed airliners on 9/11/01 is very likely similar. We know that historically large amounts of cash were created in response to the attacks, but we sometimes lose sight of the fact that at the center of any operation--be it nefarious or banal, from mass murder to dry cleaning--has people who don't want to rock the boat--especially if it's a yacht.

The stench of the scandals that broke out on Wall Street in 2008 was such that it made the scandals at companies like Enron and WorldCom from only six years earlier seem like a distant memory. But those are relevant examples as well. Here's a comment Ralph Nader made at that time:

'"What amazes me is that there are thousands of people who could have been whistle-blowers, from the boards of directors to corporate insiders to the accounting firms to the lawyers working for these firms to the credit-rating agencies.

"All these people! Would a despotic dictatorship have been more efficient in silencing them and producing the perverse incentives for them all to keep quiet? The system is so efficient that there's a total silence. I mean, the Soviet Union had enough dissidents to fill Gulags."

No doubt. Great quote, btw. I vaguely remember Chomsky saying something similar in terms of how our media operate--no need to censor the NY Times because the NYT would never hire someone who says things they disagree with IN THE FIRST PLACE!

Sometimes at JREF (in the old days...) I would find myself in disbelief that someone would be so gung ho about disagreeing with solid bits of evidence (microspheres comes to mind, but not the only thing by a long shot)--they MUST have been disinfo agents, right? But on reflection, although I am certain there were a couple disinfo agents, mostly they were probably just humans operating in their normal, learned behavior patterns--just like groups of idiots in highschool.

Hence, all it would take is to sell the narrative as a terrorist plot, complete with an anti-American supervillain, for everyone to jump on board. There are plenty of smart people in this country who, for SOLELY financial reasons, cannot ever come to terms with the evidence of an internal plot to murder our own citizens.

At any rate, I know this line of inquiry isn't exactly ripe for dissemination to the unwashed masses, but for those who already take issue with the official story, it helps to understand that not everyone with access to information about the WTC complex before 9/11 was "evil" or "morally inept" or whatever dehumanization we like to throw around.

The same holds true for many people who worked for the companies that ultimately defrauded the US taxpayers. There are plenty of support staff, plenty of regular people who thought themselves lucky to have jobs at these "nice" companies. They might have had some idea of what was going on, but at the crux of this fraud, and likely at the crux of the pre-9/11 WTC operations, there were/are only a handful of people who knew they were setting out to rob people and leave them destitute (in the case of Wall Street) and to murder people for money (WTC).